Support Kellogg's and Fight the Bully

Photo: Eleven, of Stranger Things, from yahoo.com/tv

If you're completely unfamiliar with the situation, first read this article by clicking here.

In a surprising move this week, Kellogg's pulled its advertising dollars from the website of Breitbart News. Many other companies have since followed suit. Breitbart is the ultra-right wing, conservative site that calls itself a "news organization." It's not. It publishes opinion, not fact, and it only publishes one type of opinion, rather than many. News organizations, of course, publish the news, which always involves facts. It also publishes all types of news, not just the type that pushes its own propaganda. The founder of Breitbart, Stephen Bannon, is essentially the man behind the strategy that won Trump the White House, and is destined to be someone of importance in Trump's machine. Think of Bannon as you will, but you can't deny that he has his own super-conservative right-wing agenda, which even Trump at times doesn't agree with.

Whatever.

The main idea of this post is to point out that, for whatever reason, Kellogg's pulled the plug on its advertising dollars on the website, which is more of a blog than a "news source." This is not unusual, as companies frequently pull its advertising from places that they feel don't (or won't) generate as much income, or reach a particular consumer group. Kellogg's insists that the withdrawal is not political, and I'm inclined to believe that. After all, one doesn't advertise on Breitbart to begin with unless one wants to reach white, super-conservative, right-wing readers. This was the case before Trump, and it's certainly the case now. If the withdrawal was political, the ads would never have been there in the first place. And since the site has generated more hits since election day, it makes sense that the company would've kept its ads there.

So what's the reason?

In an article you can read at this link, the point was raised that companies can reach Breitbart's type of readership more effectively via other avenues, such as any website of Glenn Beck's. But the main reason Kellogg's and other companies pulled the plug is because they may not have known that their ads were on the site to begin with. Apparently, ads that we see on the left and right of the screen online are not put there by those companies. They're placed by yet another company that gets paid to put ads on websites where they'll be seen. Since Breitbart's readership has grown, those companies put the ads of Kellogg's and other companies on that website. Some companies, like Kellogg's, and now like Vanguard, 3M and AARP, apparently didn't want to spend their ad dollars there, or they didn't want to reach the readers Breitbart's caters to, or, as Kellogg's said, because Breitbart's "didn't align with their values."

Fair enough. Happens all the time. From the linked article:

While Breitbart is billing Kellogg’s decision as “bigoted and anti-American,” it’s a well-established American business practice for corporations to shift their sponsorship to companies they believe will help bolster their brand. In the case of reaching conservative audiences, advertisers that exit Breitbart aren’t necessarily snubbing those consumers because other conservative-leaning outlets, such as Fox News or Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, have an overlap. 

“There are a lot of places advertisers can go to reach the same audience, and even maybe a bigger audience,” Wilkins said.

Hell, I've lost a few blog followers over the years because they may not have liked the thoughts I've espoused here. Whatever. To each his own. If I made money from this blog by putting ads on it (I've been offered many times, but I don't), that would hurt a bit because companies gauge a blog's hits and its numbers of followers when they decide what to advertise on. Blogger, in fact, may place some ads for companies that pay them to do so. If not, another company gets paid to do that, and they in turn probably give a cut to Blogger, since Blogger has an icon that I could insert into this blog which would run the ads that would generate money for me. After that, I get lost.

A Vanguard spokesperson maybe explains it better:

Vanguard said it removed its ads as soon as it became aware that they were running on Breitbart. “As a policy, Vanguard does not advertise on any overtly political websites, including the site in question,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email. She said the ads appeared as part of a “remarketing” program, which are ads that appear to clients and investors when they visit third-party websites because of their browsing history. 

“Our remarketing advertisements are limited to pre-approved sites (again, no political sites), however it was brought to our attention last week that this site was inadvertently included,” she said.

So the shocking thing here isn't that Kellogg's pulled its ads. The surprising thing is that Breitbart has pushed a boycott on Kellogg's for doing so. That's nuts! That's like me trolling the followers who have left the blog over the years. Won't do that. That's like a newspaper publishing an article against a company that decides not to put ads in that newspaper anymore. Wait--actually, it's not, because a newspaper actually is a news organization that publishes news and facts, and news and facts of different types, like local news, national news, world news, sports, money and finance, etc. Breitbart, which calls itself a "news organization," doesn't do that.

Instead, like Trump did, it declares war and attacks those people and businesses they feel have slighted or threatened it.

This is frightening for many reasons. As the linked article said:

Breitbart’s campaign against Kellogg’s is unusual on a number of fronts, not in the least because news organizations traditionally maintain a separation between their business operations and their editors and reporters so that journalists can operate independently from business interests... And whether the boycott will help Breitbart financially appears questionable, given that attacking a major advertiser isn’t likely to make the site more appealing to other brands. 

“Reporters don’t behave that way in the U.S., nor should they,” said Lee Wilkins, professor and chair of the department of communications at Wayne State University, who’s an expert in media ethics. “Most journalistic organizations have checks between the people who pay for your news work and the news work itself, so that you are as a journalist protected from those influences.”  She said she views Breitbart as a blog rather than a journalistic organization. “If you aren’t a journalism organization, then those safeguards are never in place.”

This is an important distinction. A "news source," which Breitbart isn't, cannot influence its news reporters about what news to print. It can't be seen as a bully to its own reporters, thereby creating a bias about what gets reported and what doesn't. But Breitbart can do that, as it is, solely because it's not a legit news source, but rather more of an opinionated blog. But a business of any kind can't declare war on another business because that company pulls its ads.

It's not personal. It's business. This is yet another example that shows that Breitbart, Bannon and Trump don't get that distinction. Politics and business are not personal. You can't bully and attack those who disagree with you or who don't support you. That's a tyrannical thing to do. In America, we don't bully or declare war on our political enemies, and we do not suppress the news, or only report one type of news story. That's not what a democracy does.

So, in the spirit of democracy, to fight back against the bullies, I suggest that next time you want some cereal, or some breakfast food, buy Kellogg's. Let's support the first company that in a democratic fashion pulled its ads from a very un-democratic site. Let's support the first one brave enough to take a stance.

My better half has Kellogg's Eggo's for breakfast a few times a week, and Eleven loves them. Good stuff.

My Newest Short Story Is Up!!!

If you're looking for a very, very short story about a private detective profiling and following a possible rapist, then my newest short story, "Pink Lemonade," is for you.  It's free right now at OverMyDeadBody.com.  (It's also about letting people be; see: the last sentence and the title.)

And if you have a moment, please take a look at another Brad Foster story, "Everything's Connected," published last year at OMDB!, which the publisher was nice enough to link to this story.

I'm interested in what you think about "Pink Lemonade," so please send me an email or a comment and opine!

Thanks again for reading my stuff.  It means a lot to me.

BTW, I can log onto the website directly from my Microsoft Edge (Explorer) but not from my Google Chrome.  Can anyone explain this?

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, EVERYONE!!!

The Murder Room

Photo: Book's cover, from my Goodreads page

For a writer like me (whatever that means), this is a great book, a source of story and book ideas for years to come.

It's also a great book for its content alone.  Capuzzo's writing took some getting used to, and I really didn't like how he sometimes jumped around, sometimes didn't (It reminded me of a recent time when I told someone that someone else we knew wasn't even predictable in her unpredictability), but the content is so compelling, and the cases so interesting, that you'll read on anyway, as I did.  The writing finally grounded itself about three-fourths of the way through, so that finally became a strength as well.

If you like this stuff--and I mean: investigations, tracking down killers, solving cases, profiling, cold cases, etc.--then this is a must-read.  If you don't, I don't know, because there's a lot of that here, even more than usual for books like this.  Much of it is grisly, and if you didn't have a healthy distrust of strangers before this, you will after this.  (Which is ironic, because the old adage is true in this book: 90% of all murder victims knew their killers well.)  If you can't handle the grisliness and sadness inherent in books like this, don't read this.  (The case of The Boy in the Box will especially haunt.)

The book, which is nonfiction, is about the Vidocq Society, a members-only group of the world's best investigators, morticians, detectives, profilers, crime scene analysts, and everyone else you can imagine associated with tracking down killers and serial killers.  (You need to read this if you don't know the difference between them.)  The group was started by three guys, all of them profiled (pardon the pun) here.

Frank Bender is (or, was, as he's died since publication) a bust-making artist of unparalleled excellence.  He could make a plaster bust of a face where one didn't exist.  He first specialized in time-lapse facial reconstruction.  What would a killer on the lam for 20 years look like since his last photo?  Bender made a cast of the guy's face, using a very old photo and a lot of whim, guessing, and innate talent, and the day after it was shown on America's Most Wanted, the guy was turned in.  Even more impressive: a skull is found with the face completely bashed in.  Using lots of research and a guess at what the partial sinus cavity would've looked like, and therefore the nose, etc., he made a bust that the murdered woman's mom saw and recognized immediately.  Fascinating.  He also had an open marriage and an insatiable drive and desire, not all of it artistic.  In essence, a whirlwind of energy you wish you had, used in ways you wish you could use it.  Bender was a very interesting, knowledgeable and, possibly, clairvoyant guy.  He said he could see and hear dead people in his dreams, and that he could feel the universe flow.  Read this book before you call that crazy.

Richard Walter is a profiler like no other.  Police departments take cold cases to him--and I mean, freezing, like over 50 years old--and he tells them where they went wrong, how they went wrong, and who the killer is.  The book makes it seem like he did this quicker than possible--he has to read case files over 1,000 pages long--but he soaks all the information in and somehow sees through all the wrong turns right away.  I've read a few myself, and I can't keep all the facts, wrong facts, suspects, wrongful suspects, theories, wrong theories, evidence, wrong evidence, and everything else straight in my head, or on paper.  He reads it, disects it, and tells you everything when he's done.  And he's always right.  BTW, the killer has over 90% of the time been questioned by police already, often several times.  Much of the time, the killer is who the police knows him (or, glaringly in this book, her) to be, but they can't prove it.  Often, Bender and Walter tell the police what they need to know so they, the police, can say it to the killer and get a confession.

William Fleisher put these guys together and started the group officially.  He's a well-respected investigator and a very well-liked and well-connected guy.  Elected the group's first president, he seems to be the glue that holds everything, and everybody, together.  He started the group with just these three guys, and now manages 82 (one for every year of its namesake's life) and hundreds of associate members.

As the society's website says, "The Vidocq Society is named for Eugène François Vidocq, the ground-breaking 19th century French detective who helped police by using the psychology of the criminal to solve "cold case" homicides. Vidocq was a former criminal himself, and used his knowledge of the criminal mind to look at murder from the psychological perspective of the perpetrator."  Bender was a former criminal as well.

Some of the many cases covered here are:

The Boy in the Box.  (Warning: This one is very depressing and disturbing.)

A robbery that was actually a planned murder.

A skull without a face.

A psychopathic murderess who worked as a waitress.

A guy who brings his case to the Society at their meeting, and is profiled as the murderer.

A young woman from Phoenix whose remains were found in Colorado.

Three cases over 50 years old.

There's so much going on in this book that it may need a second reading.  As engrossing as it was, I read some parts and I thought, "Yup, I can use that," several times.  So get past the scattered writing at first and you'll be taken for an interesting, chilly, intelligent, unbelievable, and--finally--well-written ride.

Post A Book-Selfie and Support Schools and Libraries

 

 

Photo: Kami Garcia, and a good book.

 

Dear Blog Readers:

 

Below is an email sent to me from Kami Garcia, author of the Dangerous Creatures series.  Rather than using her publisher's marketing budget to, well, market her book, she has nicely asked for that money to be used to buy books for schools and libraries in need.  (This is an unbelievably nice thing to do, considering the book market today.)  Unfortunately, I don't Tweet, and I don't have a Twitter account, so I'm hoping my readers will take part in this worthy campaign, in place of my un-technologically advanced self.  Please and thanks!

 

[Now that I went to the website, I see that this is something I can do because it's not a Twitter page.  Or is it?  This sort of proves my point about my tech savvy, but whatever.  I'll post a book-selfie--but you should also do the same!]

 

Here's her email to me:

 

_____

 

Hi guys! 

Reminder: The #booksarentdangerous campaign kicks off today at 9 AM PST / 12 EST. 

Short explanation: Dangerous Deception comes out in a week, and instead of a traditional campaign, we got our publisher (LBBYR) to donate our marketing budget to buying books for underfunded schools and libraries.

You are all invited to join in the fun & help get books onto the hands of needy kids!

Attached is the campaign graphic, in case you wanted to share it anywhere, and/or point people to booksarentdangerous.com which is where we will be posting campaign details as well as resources for book donations in the days to come. (Feel free to share yours as well!)

 

But also hopefully this: donate a book and encourage your readers to put up a pic and do the same!

Remember to use the hashtag #BooksArentDangerous. It can be any book that you loved, that mattered to you, or that you recommend.

LBBYR will take each picture as your pledge to donate a book to an underfunded school or library and will match these donations throughout the next two weeks.

Let's get some books into the hands of kids in our local school libraries! Pass it on!

Again, questions to shanepangburn@gmail.com. 

And this concludes our spam. Love to all!

XOXO Kami & Margie

Quick Jots 2.1.15

--The website urlmetrics.com says that my website, the one you're currently reading, is ranked 13,660,425 in the entire United States.  I don't know if this is deplorable, or actually really good.  There are about 360 million people in this country, but how many of them have websites or blogs?  10%?  That would place me 13.6 million out of 36 million, which I guess isn't that bad.  But if that ranking also includes sites like msn.com, and other huge pages like that, than the ranking is really impressive.  I mean, I don't post any video, or music.  Very few pics or links.  Mostly, just me ranting, really, and usually about books or movies--not riveting for most people.  So, I can't decide if this is really cool, or if it really isn't, or if I just need to get a life.  Or any combination.  And I don't know how I stumbled upon urlmetrics.com to begin with, as I was just logging off to go to bed.  (It's 1 a.m. on Feb. 1, 2015.)

--And the site said this blog has an estimated worth of $749.93!  This is interesting because I pay less than $50 a year to keep it going, and I don't sell anything on it, and I don't have any ads on it.  Does this mean that my thoughts have actual value?  Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice...

--So now I'm thinking how I can make the actual $749.93 from this, without putting up any ads.  I would never do that to you, my cherished readers, or to myself.  So...anyone wanna cut me a check for $749.93?

--If you wanna see for yourself, here's the link.  The monthly visits and monthly pages viewed stats are way off, by the way.  I get many more than what it says, for both.  I got 1,594 pageviews last month, which was a little low for me, according to the Google Analytics stuff.  I'm just sayin'.  So, I wonder what the ranking would be if the stats were correct on that page?  I need a moment to get over myself.

So what else is going on...

--I got just over 19" of snow here this week, Tuesday and Wednesday.  And it looks like I'm getting 10" to 12" more Sunday night through Tuesday morning.  Damn good thing I have lots of house projects and writing things to do.  And I don't mind the cold, as it actually improves my sinuses.  Still...I think I can do without for awhile now.  I can see more ice on my driveway than cement.

--And it's going to be -3 here Thursday night.  That's real temp, not wind chill.

--I've had enough with the Patriots' hijinks, but still...If you make the teams bring their own 12 footballs, you're begging for a problem.  I mean, the $1 billion + business that's the NFL can't afford its own 24 footballs for one of the two playoff games playing that week?

--And you can't tell me the other teams haven't been doing something with their footballs all this time.  I wonder if the Pats would get ratted on if they didn't win as often.  The Jets, for example, rat on the Pats, not the other way around.  Speaking of which--Every football team has cameras filming the other sideline--a few years ago during Spygate, before that, and even now, I'd bet.  I'd be shocked if that didn't happen in college, too.

--And deflated footballs didn't cause the Colts to lose by 38 points.  Unless the balls themselves can score five touchdowns and a field goal, that is.

--Having said that, a note to the Patriots: Let's just play the game, shall we?

--I'm a Pats fan, but I pick the Seahawks to win.  The Pats have trouble with great rushing QBs.  But Wilson will lose if he throws a handful of picks again.  Belichick has already forgotten more about football than I'll ever know, but I'll say it anyway: If I'm the Pats, I try to shut down the Seahawks's running game, keep Wilson in the pocket, and make him beat me with his arm.  This will be a lot easier if the Pats can lead early by a score or two, so he has to throw.

--As for the halftime show, well...I'm not her target audience, but Katy Perry is amusing.  She doesn't take herself too seriously, and she doesn't try to be more than what she is: a pop star with a core audience of 13-18 year old girls.

--That's not the Super Bowl audience, but we'll see what the Halftime ratings turn out to be.

--And I approve of a recently-released pic of her and her small dog.  It's looking at the camera like the person taking the picture has just said, "Wanna go for a walk?" or "Wanna eat?"

--And, please, I'd take Katy Perry over Rick Perry any day, every day.

--Mitt Romney announced this week that he will not run for president after all.  When asked how sure he was, he said, "Oh, about 47%."

--Mike Huckabee said he probably will run, and Sarah Palin changes her mind (or, "mind") by the minute, so I'm keeping some blog tabs ready to go, just in case.  Cuz there's gonna be a lotta verbal head-scratchin' silliness with those two.

--Speaking of blog tabs, you may have noticed that I have not been using my American Horror Story: Freak Show or Cards and Commentary blogs at all.  Just haven't had the time.  For the record, this past season's AHS was very good, light-years ahead of Coven.  Though the last two or three episodes were just Eh.  But well-done Eh, if you know what I mean.

--Biggest beef: Some sort of odd character judgement by the show's creators.  For the last two years, the last episode was about most of the characters dying, and what kind of "heaven" they go to.

--And there was something disquieting about watching three people eating popcorn while watching a guy dressed in just his underwear drown to death while chained to a cement block.

--Watching someone struggle and die in pain and vain is...well, watching someone struggle and die in pain and vain.  Just because you're watching someone die like that who'd also murdered people and who'd also watched many people die like that, that doesn't mean you're not also murdering him.

--And liking it.

--Now that I put it like that...the last episode wasn't so great after all.

--I'm tired of seeing characters knocked out just so they can wake up and die badly.  Off the top of my head, this also happened in: the remake of The Last House on the Left; True Lies; Die Hard 4, all of the Saw movies, and countless other shows and movies I've seen that I forget because it's now 2 a.m.  It's done for the same effect--this time by the movie's audience--as described above.  The movie-makers will tell you it's done for the audience's catharsis, so the audience will see that evil fails and all is right with the world again--but that's crap, of course, and they know it.

--The movie-makers do that because they assume we all have the same base instincts and desires.

--We don't.  

History's Lost Treasures by Eric Chaline

Photo: The book's cover, from its Amazon page.

The second-to-last book I read in 2014 was this extremely interesting and informative book probably best read on The Throne, especially since each chapter is two pages long, max.  But the articles can teach the reader quite a bit about history, which the author, who I've never heard of, clearly knows thoroughly.  He writes about people, events and things very casually, as if he's so familiar with them that he forgets others may not be.
 
This could've led to pedantic and professorial prose, but it never does.  In fact, Chaline clearly took great pains to make this as conversational as possible, sometimes to a fault.  At points it becomes too author-intrusion opinionated.  At others, it becomes a bit pedestrian, like the authors' bios at the back of YA books that try too hard to connect to the YA reader.  The kids are much more sophisticated than that, I assure you; similarly, the author here at times forgets that his audience might be a little more sophisticated than he thinks.
 
I bought this in the remainder bin (for less than seven bucks), and I had to list this title manually on Goodreads (where you'll find my reviews for dozens of books), so take those for what they're worth.
 
All that notwithstanding, this is, as I mentioned, a very interesting and informative book that reads like it was written by scholarly-type on a scholarly-type website, and it probably is somewhere.  I'll guess you can find it on Amazon for a few pennies. (Not that I'm in favor of the public doing that, as the author generally loses out.)
 
Lost treasures (some found, some not) include:

Wondrous burial goods: Tutankhamun's death mask • A real crock of gold: The treasure of Villena • Sunken plunder: The Nuestra Señora de Atocha • Religious rarities: The unique Jain bronzes of Chausa • Stolen artworks: The missing van Gogh paintings • Dazzling gems: The La Peregrina Pearl

No matter how you get a copy, you should do so, even if you read it in small doses, in the room I mentioned above.  There's no sin in that.

The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber -- Web Sleuths and Cold Cases

Photo: The hardcover's hardcover, from this website at Simon and Schuster.


Though a little dry at times, The Skeleton Crew is a work unlike anything I've read before: a nonfiction piece about web sleuths, people who match missing people with unidentified bodies, thereby giving closure to the families of the dead and, to boot, solving a cold case.

That such people exist is a surprise, and yet not, to me at the same time.  Mostly the web detectives are obsessed people with a personal void to fill.  Some are siblings of someone murdered, or someone missing.  Todd Matthews, the man the book revolves around the most, had siblings die very young--just a few years old--and he thinks he's perhaps trying to resurrect them, in a way.  He doesn't really know.

But he solved the now-infamous case of Tent Girl.  In this book you'll also read about the still-unsolved case of the Lady of the Dunes, from Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  Another case, of a young redhead killed in the desert outside of Las Vegas, haunts me still.

And you might be surprised to know that as many as 40,000--and perhaps more--unidentified bodies take up space right now in coroner's offices throughout the U.S.  More find their way into the unidentified statistics every day.

And they're not all homeless, addicts or prostitutes, either.

One article I read today--similar to this book but not in any way connected to it--concerned a woman who lived under a ton of aliases for over thirty years before she committed suicide in Texas.  Who was she, really?  Nobody knows--including her husband.  She'd covered her tracks that well.  Her latest driver's license was of a name she'd stolen off of an 18-month old's gravestone in Idaho.

Then there was the story of a woman who was kidnapped, sold to a man who molested her and married her (yes).  She's not dead, of course, but she tells the story of a woman, from her exact same situation, who was killed by the man she'd had to marry.  Who was this other girl?  Nobody knows.  She'd just been taken off the street, sold to some guy, and re-named.  And now she's dead, and nobody knows who she is--not even the guy who kidnapped her.

So who's The Lady in the Dunes?  The woman who had her head bashed in and her hands chopped off to hinder her identification?  Nobody knows.  And there's thousands of people like her, unidentified, unknown, unburied and ungrieved-for, all over the country.

Fascinating, in a sad, morbid, I-can't-believe-it kind of way.

And definitely worth reading, if you can stomach it.

It's written by Deborah Halber in a literary-mystery kind of way, weaving interconnected stories, flashing back, coming back around again.  You have to pay attention, but it's easy to do if you care enough.  I found myself Googling some of the nicknames and some of the victims, and reading a few of the websites mentioned in the book.

I even gave a passing thought to trying it myself.  Me, the web sleuth.  But I won't. 

I know better.  It's too depressing and too addicting, and I'd never recover.

The writer in me sees a good novel in here somewhere.  I'll add it to the list of manuscripts-to-come for now.  I've got to return the book to the library, but I'll look to buy it soon, so I can own it when I start to write my web-sleuthing novel.

The Obama Care Website: A Plea

Photo: President Bush and President-Elect Obama meet in the Oval Office on November 10, 2008.  From Obama's Wikipedia page.

This isn't exactly a political rant, so stay with me if you felt like leaving because of that.  It's more of a plea, I guess.

There are so many Republicans slamming Obama for the recent website problems, and for what some are perceiving as his sleight-of-hand about being able to keep current policies.  (I don't know about that.  Though both parties have their hands in the health care industry's pockets, which one do you think counts more on money from it?  I'll provide a hint: It's the party that's not trying to change it.)  Some Democrats seem to think that his ship is sinking.

It's not--though it has taken a torpedo hit.

The bottom line here is that there's a website that's not working right.

There's an insurance industry that said one thing to Obama and then did another.

Or, in fairness, perhaps the President himself said one thing to the insurance industry, then did the other.

My guess is that it's both.  And surely the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing here.

But that's all.  It's surely a mess.  It looks bad.  It's Obama's biggest misstep so far.  And what was he thinking when he hired a Canadian internet company to do an American website?  This is bad enough, in terms of our economy--and even worse when you consider that Canada itself fired this internet company when it flubbed work for Canada.

Maybe Obama didn't make that decision himself, but the buck stops with him, and he'll say the same himself.

But let's take a step back.

Did we actually think that overhauling the American healthcare industry would be easy?  Is a radical change ever simple?  And what's wrong with trying to change American socio-economic parity as we know it?  Wouldn't you think there'd be a few mistakes along the way?

This is ground-level health care and social upheaval, and we thought a mouse click would make it all perfect?  That there wouldn't be mistakes, "fumbles," and some honest errors and humane shortsightedness?

So the site doesn't work.

It'll get fixed.

It's the first huge step for equity in health care in this country, something that hopefully narrows the gap between the rich and the poor.  A simple website won't make it all happen by itself, but it's a step in the right direction.

And it'll get better.

Let's all stop rattling our sabres against those who try to make drastic change for the better good and who make a few mistakes while doing so.  Are we not to have groundbreaking change unless it's quick and easy and perfect?  Drastic change is never easy.  And no one thing--health care or anything else--is going to be perfect for everyone, all at the same time.

Yes, Obama dropped the ball here.  But he cared enough to try to make the play to begin with.  He'll pick it up again.  He'll learn from his mistakes.  My guess is he doesn't like to be wrong, at all.  He knows that this will be one of the biggest things he'll be remembered for--good or bad.

And here's one more sports metaphor for you: an infielder who gets to more grounders (and who therefore has more range) will make more errors than will an infielder who never gets to the ball to begin with.  This second infielder will have a misleadingly and superficially better fielding percentage--he'll make fewer errors--because he won't attempt a great play if he thinks there's a chance he'll make an error.

Those who try to make great plays will make more mistakes than those who don't.

Possibly Obama's reach has exceeded his grasp here.  But he attempted to make the play that nobody else could--or would, or wanted to--and then he bobbled it.  And then he dropped it.

But he tried to make the play.

Let's applaud that.  And let's have some patience as he makes the play without a drop next time.  Or would we rather have a nation of leaders who don't try to ever again make a great and sweeping change for fear of such an impatient and unforgiving public and political backlash?

He was at least brave enough to chance failure.

And then he failed.

But that's temporary.

Let's understand that most politicians would never have attempted such legislation and change to begin with, specifically because of the very real probability of failure, and of the fear of the political finger-pointing afterward.

Nobody would know the stakes better than the first black President in American history.  Aware of the severe ramifications, he tried anyway.

Let's be proud of those who selflessly take chances for the better good.

And let's help them fix their mistakes rather than blaming them for their very humane imperfections.

Unless we have a better idea to create beneficial social change for the good of those less fortunate than ourselves--and I didn't see anybody else trying anything lately--let's help those who do, and not just point our fingers at them.

P.S.--According to his website, the health insurance marketplace is once again open.  Try it now, if you need to.  Give it a chance, and be thankful, as I always am, when someone tries to help.  Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but people don't often go out of their way to help change people's lives, do they? 

Poem Published

Photo: A Florida Box Turtle, from the Wikipedia page for "turtle."  (You'll have to read below to get the connection between the title and the pic.)

Just a quick note:

My poem, "An Old Man," (which is not about an old man, per se; it's an extended metaphor, representative of all of us) has been accepted for publication by the good people at Lost Tower Publications, in the U.K.  It'll be in an anthology, Hope Springs A Turtle (Get it?  Instead of "Hope Springs Eternal?"), and 10% of the proceeds will be donated to Mind U.K., a mental health charity in the United Kingdom.  More details here. 

The anthology will be available in book form, and as an e-book.  I'll send another notice sometime later when the book and e-book are available.  It ain't Shakespeare, but at least now I can say I'm a published poet.  I've published a short story, a short nonfiction piece, and now a poem.  After he mentioned this about me, a friend of mine then said that I'm more versatile than the elastic of his underwear, at which point I murmured "Thanks" and walked away.  Ewwwwwwwwwww.......

The publication's website, linked in the last word of the first paragraph, said the poem needs "to invoke the spirit of hope."  For those of you who know me, and who are wondering how anyone can construe anything I write as an invocation of hope, I have to say that this one does.  I've thought of the poem as a combination of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," and an old man looking at his burial plot in a snow-covered, wind-swept  cemetery.  Although even the gravestones themselves are covered by a sheet of frozen, crusted snow, he will do his best to survive, anyway, even if he is cognizant of the fact that we'll all have our own resting place someday, and it'll be unknown to the world, and it won't even be visible to anyone during a snowy winter.

Yeah.  Cuz I'm like that.  It is hopeful, though, in its own way.  Trust me.

My Published Interview

The link below is to The Writer's Block, a great website for writers, newbie or not.  The owner of the site was nice enough to interview me about my writing, the published story, and other things, awhile back, and she posted it on the eleventh.  Check it out, and while you're there, look around at all the other cool links for writers and readers, too.

Thanks!  And thanks to Rachelle for interviewing me and for posting it!  If you didn't click the link above, click the one here:

http://www.raychelle-writes.blogspot.com/2012/04/writers-block-interviews-steven.html